DEVELOPER MEET

The annual winter meeting of Europe’s open source developers took place February 25-27 in Brussels, Belgium. Again the event was a mustn’t miss for thousands of contributors to free projects and a welcome opportunity for developers to exchange ideas outside the borders of their own communities.

In the fifth year since its inception, the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source European Meeting) developer conference remains true to its principles: free, as technical as possible, and only as commercial as needs be. This concept continues to draw increasing numbers of developers from all over Europe and the US. The big guns were all there; for example, Alan Cox, who has returned to kernel development after a break, Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales, Richard Stallman, Theo de Raadt from Open BSD, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich. The organizers talked of 3,500 attendees, but arrived at this figure by adding the attendees from both days. Realistically, the figure is somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 participants, as the majority attended both days.